Commentary: Liners say don’t count on developed trades

Thursday, September 27, 2012

This month’s cover story addresses the idea that the top global liner carriers must adjust to a new era of reduced demand growth from North America and Europe.
So it came as a welcome bit of justification when two of the world’s top liner executives acknowledged in mid-September that demand for liner carrier services on the major east-west trades may never return to the glory days of the mid-2000s.
APL President Ken Glenn told a liner shipping conference in Singapore the industry should get accustomed to annual growth in the 5 percent to 6 percent range rather than the 9 percent to 10 percent seen for much of the previous decade.
“There is not another China,” Glenn said at the Containerisation International’s Global Liner Shipping Conference in Asia. “And the main growth in the future will not be in the major line-haul trades.”
In the same week, Maersk Group Chief Executive Officer Nils Andersen told Reuters that debt-ridden economies and Europe and North America have fundamentally changed the business for liner carriers.
“We see the U.S. actually being in recovery ahead of Europe, though that doesn’t mean it will return to the glory days,” he said. “People are worried and there’s good reason for that, because the economies are over-leveraged. If you look at the foreign debt situation of the U.S. it’s enough to make anybody scared and the deficit of the government is just mind-blowing. I don’t think we’ll be in this crisis forever, but at least for Europe, it will take a couple of years to get out of it.”
Andersen, like Glenn, said the growth will come from middle class expansion in emerging markets. The trigger for this change may have come from the economic downturn in 2008-09, but it’s taken a full three years for a realization that previous demand is unlikely to return. (Eric Johnson)